The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [91]
“Don’t let anyone see you use that camera,” Mongnan told him. “I’ll come find you in a couple days.”
He closed his eyes. It seemed he could make out the plaintive groans of roofing metal in the evening wind, of nails squeaking in the grip of contracting wood, of human bones stiffening and hardening on thirty thousand bunks. He could hear the slow swivel of searchlight tripods and he could make out the hum of electricity charging perimeter wires and the icy crackle of ceramic insulators on their poles. And soon he would be in the center of it, in the belly of the ship once again, but this time, there would be no surface, no hatch, just the slow endless pitch of everything to come.
Mongnan indicated the boots in his hand. “They’ll try to get those from you. Can you fight?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Then put them on,” she told him.
The way you dig into a boot for old sticky toes is the way you spring a trapdoor in a DMZ tunnel or pull a stranger off a beach in Japan: you just take that breath and go. Closing his eyes, Jun Do breathed deeply and reached inside the dank boots, sweeping his fingers back and forth, feeling all the way in. Finally, he turned his wrist so he could scrape out the depths, and he removed what he had to remove. It left a scowl on his face.
He turned to the medics, to the guard, to the doomed half-dead.
“I was a model citizen,” he told them. “I was a hero of the state,” he added, and then stepped through the door in his new boots, out into a matterless place, and from this point forward nothing further is known of the citizen named Pak Jun Do.
WE WERE finalizing a month-long interrogation of a professor from Kaesong when a rumor spread through the building that Commander Ga had been apprehended and was here, in custody, in our own Division 42. Right away, we sent the interns, Q-Kee and Jujack, upstairs to processing to see if this was true. Certainly we were dying to get our eyes on Commander Ga, especially after all the stories that had been flying around Pyongyang lately. Could it be the same Commander Ga who’d won the Golden Belt, who’d bested Kimura in Japan, who’d rid the military of homosexuals and then married our nation’s actress?
But our work with the professor was at a critical stage and couldn’t be abandoned for a little celebrity gawking. The professor’s was a textbook case, really: he had been accused of counterrevolutionary teachings, specifically using an illegal radio to play South Korean pop songs to his students. It was a silly charge, probably just the work of a rival at his university. Such things are hard to prove one way or another. Most people in North Korea work in pairs, so there is always a co-worker ready to give evidence or denounce his partner. Not so with a professor, whose classroom is his own domain. It would’ve been easy to get the professor to confess, but that’s not us, we don’t work that way. You see, Division 42 is really two divisions.
Our rival interrogation team is the Pubyok, named after the “floating wall” defenders that saved Pyongyang from invaders in 1136. There are only a dozen or so Pubyok left, old men with silver crewcuts who walk in a row like a wall and truly believe they can float, stealthy as ghosts, from one citizen to the next, interrogating them as a wind interrogates the leaves. They are constantly breaking their hands, on the principle that the bones grow back stronger, knitting in extra layers. It is a terrible thing to see, old men, out of nowhere, cracking their hands on doorjambs or the rims of fire barrels. The Pubyok all gather ’round when one is about to break a hand, and the rest of us, the thinking, principled remainder of Division 42, have to look away. Junbi, they say, almost softly, then count hana, dul, set and shout Sijak! Then there’s the weirdly dead sound of a hand striking the edge of a car door. The Pubyok believe that all subjects arriving at Division 42 should be met with brutality right away—senseless, extended, old-fashioned hurt.
And then there is my team—correction: